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A Baseball Lifer Adds Chapters, a Game at a Time

Doc Edwards, now in his 57th year in professional baseball, signs an autograph for a fan.Credit
Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

SAN ANGELO, Tex. — In the clubhouse for the San Angelo Colts baseball team, a squat shed of concrete and corrugated metal planted in dust just beyond the left-field fence, a white-haired lifer named Doc Edwards is telling another story when — bam! — a sound like a gunshot goes off. He keeps talking.

Now in his 57th year in professional baseball, Mr. Edwards, 76, has a deep bench of — bam! — stories that feature a cast of thousands, from Mickey Mantle to the kid playing second base tonight whose name isn’t readily coming to mind at the — bam! — moment.

Finally, he is asked about — bam! — these unsettling bams. Just batting-practice home runs pounding the metal roof, he explains, and picks up where he left off, the interruption a brief rain delay in his spinning of another baseball-story beauty.

“I had one home run in Boston, barely scraped the top part of the fence,” he is saying. “Then Mantle hit one to center field. One-handed. More than 420 feet.”

It’s true: This heavyset man eating chips and drinking a Pepsi spent nearly a decade playing and managing in the major leagues, and a spare few of us can say the same. But most of his career has been one long minor-league bus ride, managing the Wichita Aeros, or the Charleston Charlies, or the Sioux Falls Canaries.

Now here he is, still, starting his eighth summer as the manager of the Colts in the United League Baseball, an independent collective of faint hope that operates in Texas well outside the major-league farm system. Waiting for another game. Telling another story to the reassuring pitter-patter of raining baseballs.

“The next year I got traded from Cleveland to Kansas City for Joe Azcue and Dick Howser,” he is saying. “Me and money for those two players. I just pray it was for more than 10 bucks.”

The evening droops in the dry heat. Batting practice has ended, and the grounds crew tends to an infield so dusty that one worker is wearing the head covering of a desert nomad. General admission tonight is $2, and somewhere around here the mascot, Casey the Colt, is champing at the bit.

Meanwhile, in the compressed clubhouse, Mr. Edwards talks his way toward filling out another lineup. The pitching coach has stored a bicycle in the small bathroom to his right, and in the cramped locker room to his left, athletes in the pregame state of anticipation watch a television whose channels are monitored by their skipper. (“Just baseball,” he says. “No smut.”)

His tight office has a fly swatter on the table, three weathered Colts caps on hooks and, on the wall, a half-century-old photograph of a young New York Yankee taking a home-run swing, the 38 on his uniform made small by his broad back. In the baseball outpost of San Angelo, this portrait of Doc Edwards hangs as a reminder of what once was and what might, might be.

Howard Rodney Edwards grew up in West Virginia, where his father vowed to break his legs if he followed him down into the mines. He developed into a promising catcher, served as a Navy medic with the Marines — hence the handle — and eventually joined the Cleveland Indians’ organization.

After a few years in places like North Platte, Neb., and Burlington, N.C., he became a peripatetic backup catcher for the Indians, the A’s, the Yankees and the Phillies. His was a rarefied but precarious existence, the threat of being sent back down as ever-present as his catcher’s mitt.

Mr. Edwards collected a duffel bag of stories along the way. Here’s another one: He admired Mantle, his teammate in 1965, so much that he wanted to name his first son Mickey Mantle Edwards. His wife at the time said no way, so the boy was christened Howard Michael Edwards. But he goes by Mick.

The home-plate umpire appears at the door to collect a few dozen fresh baseballs, and Mr. Edwards greets him as Mr. Smith.

“It’s Shults,” says Johnny Shults, smiling in his acceptance of Doc being Doc.

After his playing career ended in 1970 (a .238 lifetime batting average, with 15 home runs), Mr. Edwards became a sort of wandering teacher of the game. He achieved brief fame in 1981 as the manager of the Rochester Red Wings when they lost to the Pawtucket Red Sox in a 33-inning odyssey, the longest game in baseball history. A few years later he became the manager of the Cleveland Indians, but lasted less than three seasons in the job.

Then back to the minors.

The big-league amenities that Mr. Edwards once enjoyed have not extended to San Angelo. But he and his wife, Gay, share a home nearby with five pampered dogs. He has a shaded parking spot reserved behind the clubhouse. And when the team travels to play the Fort Worth Cats (240 miles) or the Texas Thunder in McAllen (450 miles), its director of broadcasting, media relations and just about everything else, David Riggs, makes sure that a first-row seat in the chartered bus is removed so the skipper can stretch out.

Besides, this is what Mr. Edwards loves to do. He loves the determined pursuit of the nearly unachievable by the young men around him. The dream to become not the next Mickey Mantle, but perhaps another Doc Edwards.

“I pray for them a lot to get to the big leagues,” he says before excusing himself to fill out a lineup and a manager’s uniform. “I do.”

Danny Hernandez, his shortstop, believes it. He says Mr. Edwards talks about his major-league past only when asked, and more often is encouraging guys to hang in there and not give up.

“Last year, I really thought I was going to be cut,” recalls Mr. Hernandez, 24 years old and hitting .231. “But he battled it out with me. He didn’t give up on me.”

Outside, a parched ballpark waits for a game to crop up. Several ballplayers hustle to a Subway for sustenance. The designated hitter takes his sandwich to his pickup’s air-conditioned cool. Another ballplayer finds cellphone privacy under a thin tree’s spare shade. A side door of the clubhouse opens, and an amber stream of tobacco spit sprays the concrete, as if emitted by the building itself.

A half-hour before game time, Mr. Edwards emerges from the clubhouse in a Colts uniform of maroon and white. The golf cart that usually carries him to the home-team dugout is broken, so he walks, slowly. He stops halfway, signs an autograph, carries on, a vessel filled with a half-century of baseball lore.

How about the time that hundreds of Orthodox Jews cheered when he stepped onto a ball field in upstate New York — which was puzzling, since he was never that good a ballplayer? Turned out that their rabbi was a kid he used to talk to while warming up pitchers in the Yankee Stadium bullpen, and this was the rabbi’s way, many years later, of showing gratitude.

The manager finds his way to his preferred spot at the end of the dugout, near the bat rack and the black telephone to the bullpen that hasn’t worked in years. Bird song serenades him from a nest tucked in the dugout’s rafters. The umpire — Shults, not Smith — instructs a wisp of a batboy not much wider than a Louisville Slugger.

A modest crowd will watch the Colts lose to the Thunder tonight. Mr. Edwards will learn that his close friend and minor-league roommate, Billy Williams — not the Hall of Famer, but a Cleveland organization journeyman — died today. And he will watch his third baseman hit a home run and then use his helmet as a tip bucket for the dollars poked through the backstop netting by appreciative fans.

All this. But first the national anthem. Doc Edwards stands and removes his cap.

Correction: June 25, 2013

An earlier version of a summary for this article misidentified the city of the Colts. They are the San Angelo Colts, not San Antonio Colts.

A version of this article appears in print on June 26, 2013, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: A Baseball Lifer,
With a Career’s Worth
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